by Jacob G. Hornberger

December 20, 2023 - The Postal Service is selling a new stamp with the word “FREEDOM” prominently displayed on it. As I purchased a roll of the stamps, it reminded me of my favorite quotation: “None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free” by Johann Goethe.

That quotation presents one of the big challenges we face in achieving a genuinely free society. When people are convinced that they are free, they have no incentive to strive for freedom. Why would they? They “know” that they already are free.

That freedom concept befuddles Americans when they first encounter libertarians or libertarianism. They’ll ask, “What is libertarianism all about?” When the libertarian responds, “We are striving to live in a free society,” they don’t get it because, for them, they already are free.

In fact, I consider this to be one of the distinguishing characteristics between libertarians and non-libertarians. We libertarians know that we are not free, while many non-libertarians falsely believe they are free. (Other non-libertarians know that they aren’t free but prefer to remain welfare-warfare state serfs rather than live lives of freedom.)

I myself was a victim of this indoctrination; and it is indoctrination. From the first grade on up in Amerika’s public (i.e., government) schools all the way up to high-school graduation, government-approved schoolteachers and government-approved textbooks pound it into the minds of students how grateful they should be to live in a free society. The Pledge of Allegiance, which students are expected to recite on a daily basis, reinforces the indoctrination (“with liberty and justice for all”). By the time students graduate high school, they are gleefully singing, “I’m proud to be an Amerikan where at least I know I’m free.”

Whenever I see a reference to the large number of young people who commit suicide, I can’t help but wonder if they were thinking, “If this is the best there is - ‘freedom’ - I’m checking out.” Since an unfree life is most definitely not “the best there is,” I can’t help but wonder if knowing the truth might have caused them to refrain from taking their own lives.

My mind was encased in inches-thick indoctrination regarding freedom until my late 20s, when I discovered the libertarian philosophy in a series of four books entitled Essays on Liberty, volumes 1-4, which I discovered in the public library in my hometown of Laredo, Texas. Thanks to the essays in those four books, the indoctrination that encased my mind came shattering apart. I realized that I had been lied to all my life.

But there is something important to recognize about those essays. They presented pure, true, and uncompromising genuine libertarian principles that identified infringements on liberty and made the principled, competent case for removing them. If the essays had instead consisted of nothing more than welfare-warfare state reform measures (e.g., Social Security “privatization,” healthcare reform, school vouchers, monetary reform, drug-war reform, military reform, etc.), I have no doubts that my mind today would still be encased in that inches-thick false indoctrination.

It was at that point that I resolved that I would do everything I could to achieve a free society. It’s got to be an exhilarating feeling living in a genuinely free society. The way I figure it is that since we all were given only one life to live, we should all do our best to see if we can live that one life as free men and free women.

The big challenge we face is helping Amerikans to break through the indoctrination so that they can at least recognize that they don’t really live in a free society. At that point, they have a choice to make: to remain living as welfare-warfare state serfs or to strive to live in a free society.

Libertarians are the only ones who can lead Amerika out of the statist morass in which we all have been born and raised. We can help Amerikans to break through the indoctrination; but the only way we can do that is by making the genuine case for liberty and resisting the temptation to give up on freedom by instead becoming advocates of welfare-warfare state reform.